Born in a Detroit suburb to a maintenance worker and a Ford Motor Company cook, at the beggining of the 70’s Mike Kelley While played drums with the influential noise-rock group Destroy All Monsters, which he cofounded with the artist-musician Jim Shaw whilst an undergrad at the University of Michigan in 1973. He moved to Los Angels in 1978 and at the California ­Institute of the Arts became a brilliant performance artist.

Kelley, a self-described “blue-collar anarchist”, rebelled against his conceptualist forebears with a stream of works that challenged art world values. Installations in Los Angeles included large-scale drawings, paintings and sculptures, as well as videos and his own writing and iconic album covers such as Sonic Youth’s Dirty.

“Mike Kelley,” the four-years-in-the-making retrospective at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, includes “Pay For Your Pleasure”, an installation of featuring portraits of famous artists, writers and poets with quotes from each about creativity and criminal thinking, juxtaposed with the ultimate criminal’s so called artwork. The show runs through April 1, 2013, then travels to Paris’s Centre Pompidou, New York’s MoMA PS1, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.